How Village Roadshow pinpoint the ROI of events with Kapiche
With Clive Miller, Head of Commercial Insights and Robert Young, Customer Insights Analyst
theme parks
guests per year
NPS survey responses annually
Village Roadshow is Australia's largest theme park operator providing some of the most thrilling entertainment, rides and slides available anywhere in the world. VRTP operates 10 theme parks across 3 countries, including Wet'n'Wild Las Vegas and Lionsgate Entertainment World in China.
INDUSTRY
Entertainment
USE CASE
Alternative to manually-coding guests NPS surveys to understand the ROI of events.
Village Roadshow is a name synonymous with the entertainment industry. Since its beginnings in the 50’s, it has built an international portfolio that includes theme parks, cinemas and film distribution.
As the business' theme park arm has grown, so too has their guest feedback. The problem is though, as it has grown, it has become harder and harder to extract actionable insights from the proliferation of customer feedback on their experience with the theme parks and events.
Village Roadshow Theme Park (VRTP) realized they needed a new approach to customer insights to stay ahead of their guest experience and to continue exceeding guest expectations.
Well informed events strategy = a great guest experience
A large part of VRTP’s strategy is built on launching events to entice new and repeat guests back to the theme parks, while maintaining a continued sense of novelty and excitement.
Understanding how these events are perceived by guests helps the insights team to determine the ROI; what a one point increase to NPS is worth to the organization in $. From there it’s a really easy decision to extend the event when it’s a hit.
So, the company’s primary method for understanding their guest’s experience was to send out surveys to event attendees on their visit date.
VRTP asks the standard NPS question to form a baseline for understanding the guest experience. The survey also asks about demographics, feedback on attractions, events, and what customers would like to see improved.
To make the most of this feedback, the insights team at Village Roadshow wanted:
A rapid process to turn customer experience feedback into customer insights, while events were still running
The ability to analyze without spending days or weeks manually-coding for high-level categories
The ability to determine the success of new events and other strategic initiatives
The agility to make accurate and timely decisions to drive ROI for the business
Clive Miller, Head of Commercial Insights at VRTP said:
Kapiche helps us to understand what matters most to our customers. What's working and what isn't. It means we can focus on the right things and ignore irrelevant factors. This alignment [with our customers] has been a major benefit.”
Goodbye manual analysis, hello faster decision-making
VRTP found it hard to understand customer data quickly and efficiently. There was a lot of information coming in and not enough people with the skills to analyze and extract beneficial insights from it.
On top of that, there was still a notable margin of error and human bias in the analyses.
Customer Analyst, Robert Young, would spend most of the time manually sorting through, tagging important comments, and analyzing them for common themes and actionable insights.
Shortly after deploying Kapiche, VRTP wanted to forecast the success of a new event, “Hooray for Hollywood”, and guest feedback played a critical role.
“Hooray for Hollywood” was a huge undertaking:
It originally spanned two weeks during school holidays.
Additional in-park entertainment, characters, foods and beverages were introduced just for the event.
There was an extended trade village, set among the backdrop of classic Hollywood movies.
For an event of this size, manual analysis and understanding guest feedback would have taken days (or weeks).
Because of this, the team lacked the ability to make quick changes like pausing or extending new initiatives based on their customer’s reception.
Robert told us that “before Kapiche, [the process] would have been very similar, except it would have been much longer and more manual in terms of reading and understanding it.”
“Normally, that would be me doing it, manually tagging those comments. It would take a lot longer… and the end analysis gets pushed out multiple days because of that.”
In its first month of working with Kapiche, VRTP managed to significantly reduce the time spent understanding their customer's feedback on the event - from days or weeks down to just an hour.
Analysis agility + reliability creates successful events
In its first month of working with Kapiche, VRTP managed to significantly reduce the time spent understanding customer feedback on the event - from days or weeks down to just an hour.
Kapiche offered them a new way to understand their guest feedback that was more agile and reliable, allowing for better decisions with less uncertainty.
Clive Miller, VRTP’s Head of Commercial Insights says that Kapiche specifically helps them to “understand what matters most to our customers. What's working and what isn't. It means we can focus on the right things and ignore irrelevant factors. This alignment [with our customers] has been a major benefit.”
Even better was the fact Kapiche could do this in less than an hour.
It allowed the customer insights team to focus on feelings and feedback explicitly mentioned by customers.
The analysis now gave the team the ability to understand how their customers truly felt about their events.
The team decided to start analyzing feedback during the show so they were well prepared to make a quick decision.
Their findings led management to extend the event for another week, because the data showed promising results. The guests loved the broader range of characters and the extra entertainment present in the park.
The fast analysis of customer feedback, which was verified by on-the-ground feedback from staff, allowed the core team to feel comfortable extending the event, much to the delight of its customers.
Crucially, it also let them quantify the ROI of the event, so they could clearly connect the impact of eachNPS point to an increase in revenue.
The above table is a screenshot from the analysis that led VRTP to extend the Hooray for Hollywood event, and to clearly identify the ROI of the event, based on their understanding of what +1 NPS point means to their organization.
Robert Young, Customer Insights Analyst said:
“We've done it before [used Kapiche] with good results behind us already; on top of that, our staff on the ground can validate what Kapiche is saying and can actually trust what comes out of the analyses.”
The future of VRTP's entertainment looks bright
Within just a month of partnering with Kapiche, Village Roadshow saw clear benefits of using Kapiche over traditional approaches to truly understand large volumes of qualitative responses into actionable insights.
In future, the speed of analysis that Kapiche offers will allow Village Roadshow to continue collecting feedback on event success quickly. This means that the team can test and try new things more often, with hard data on what to keep doing and what to change up.
Robert told us that his team feels confident about their decision to continue using Kapiche’s insights platform “because it proved reliable with Hooray for Hollywood and strengthened the company’s ability to prioritize the highest impact actions based on the ability to identify and quantify the relative benefits.”